A couple of things. One of them I wrote up over HERE. Having just reread some of it, it occurred to me that sometimes it is oneself who puts on the limitations and it takes someone else to give you a good swift kick in the butt. But there are other times when you know what you want to do and you can do it, but it requires making an end-run around the idiots of the world.

In 1955 and 56, I spent close to a year and a half in a hospital in Denver. I wasn't sick; I was undergoing physical therapy and some other treatments to alleviate the aftereffects of having polio when I was two. When I wasn't being exercised or massaged or hydrotherapized, there wasn't all that much to do, so fortunately I'd brought my guitar with me, along with a stack of classic guitar instruction manuals and song books. I spent most of my spare time practicing and learning songs, and I also had a chance to entertain a bit around the hospital. I loved doing it and people seemed to love having me do it. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to make a career of folk singing, like Burl Ives or Richard Dyer-Bennet. This was before the onset of the Great Folk Scare, so (oxymoron alert!) "professional folk singers" were not yet the drug on the market that they became a few years later. I was aware that my knowledge of music was pretty minimal, and if I wanted to be a professional musician, especially a concert performer, I had better learn something about the field I wanted to enter. I decided that when I returned to Seattle, I would enroll in the University of Washington School of Music and learn music theory, harmony, music literature, the whole bundle.

Conceive my frustration, disgust, and dismay when I ran into a brick wall when I tried to enroll. I had a voice teacher that I was happy with and since the U. W. School of Music didn't require you to take private lessons at the U, that should be okay. And I also had an excellent classic guitar teacher, plus Walt Robertson and a couple of other people to keep me up on folk guitar techniques, so I was okay in that department. That wasn't the problem.

When I was filling out the form, one of the questions had to do with which course of study I wanted to follow:   did I want to major in music education (become a music teacher in the public schools, or a music teacher in general), or did I wish to major in performance. I checked "Performance." The next question had to do with "performing on what?" If I said "voice," it would not be required, but I would be under pressure to take lessons from one of the staff teachers, so I wrote in "classic guitar." When the woman behind the counter looked at it, one would have thought that I had written down "tissue paper and comb."

"But we don't have that," she said. I allowed as how I knew they didn't have any classic guitar teachers on the staff (incidentally, now, almost fifty years later, they do—an excellent department under Steven Novacek), but since I was taking lessons on the outside, that would be no problem. What I wanted was to learn music theory, etc. "No, you don't understand," she said. "We don't recognize the guitar as a serious field of study." I pointed out that Andrés Segovia had played a concert at Meany Hall on campus not more than six months before. We beat that one around for several minutes while we both got a bit hot under the collar, but since she had The Power, she folded up my application neatly and dropped it into the waste basket. End of discussion!

Since I was in my mid-twenties at the time, I didn't generally run to my mother with my problems anymore, but since she was especially interested in my musical ambitions (she was a fan of Richard Dyer-Bennet and had met him once), I told her what had occurred when I tried to enroll. Steam started pouring out of her ears, and when that happens, lookout!! She had connections I didn't even know about. She told a friend of hers whom she knew was acquainted with a music professor at the U. of W. My mother's friend, in turn, told the professor what had happened. The professor said that he wanted to meet me.

My mom and I went to her friend's house one afternoon where I met the music professor. It turned out that it was John Verrall who, at the time, was a composer in residence, and packed a fair amount of clout in the School of Music. We talked, and I played and sang some. He knew little about the guitar, but was intrigued. He thought it would be an interesting instrument to compose for. And he was particularly fond of folk songs. "Outwardly simple and naïve," he said, "but with examination, far more subtle and complex than they first appear." He asked me my ambitions, and we discussed the matter for awhile. Finally, he said, "It was ridiculous to have refused your application. You would be a real asset to have as a student. I'll be in touch."

About a week later, he phoned and told me that he had arranged an audition for me with Dr. Stanley Chappell, the head of the department. As a result of this, I wound up being the first "folk singer" or "classic guitarist" or "singer-guitarist" admitted to the U. of W. School of Music. It wasn't long after this that I started doing a television series entitled "Ballads and Books" on the local educational channel. Lots of singing jobs came as a result of that, and since one thing leads to another, I was off and running.

The first year at the U. of W. School of Music was fine. But during my second year, I started getting a load of crap from a couple of faculty members and a stuffy student or two: "When are you going to stop messing around with those cowboy songs and settle down to something serious?" [I am reminded that after concretizing and recording for well over thirty years, after a concert, someone said to Jean Redpath, "You have such a lovely voice. Have you ever thought of doing something with it?"] This was why I dropped out of the U. of W. School of Music and a few years later enrolled in the Cornish College of the Arts here in Seattle. Smaller classes, individual attention, excellent instruction; most of the faculty were working musicians. When I first approached Cornish about going there, Lockrem Johnson the head of the music department said, "No problem." They already had four classic guitarists as students there—applications rejected by the U. of W. "Happy to have them," he said. "We don't care if you want to play tissue paper and comb" [he actually said that!] "as long as you are serious about what you're doing."

If you really want to do something, sometimes you just have to be bull-headed about it. "Too stupid to quit."

Don Firth